The supernatural, morality, and something darker.

It’s me, Cris, again.

The last time was a sort of introduction, I think. This time, I want to be a bit more serious and test myself as much as I want to be helpful to anyone who has read my book.

 

How do you write something serious in a world with witches, a very ‘fantasy’ type of naming to just about everyone?

There’s a simple answer.

You write seriously. As in, you about witches and oppression and hypocrisy and religion and all that.

An honest attempt. That’s what’s needed, and that’s what I did. Everyone in this world that I had created has to exist as a person, which means that if someone believes that everyone should die because some hooded figure told them to do so, they treat it seriously. And, of course, as the author, you should, too.

 

It’s the difference between being proud of your work and distancing yourself from it until a million people provide you some sort of validation that, yes, what you’ve written here is something of quality and competence.

You might think that those attributes are independent of an author’s ability to take their own work seriously, but I believe they aren’t. I believe it’s a requirement for any quality to appear in your work.

 

Because what does one do when they don’t take their work seriously? Imagine you’re writing a dramatic scene. You set things up nicely. Your characters all have their arcs and stories; they are all in the middle of what they want, and someone is keeping them from it. You want tension, and you put in plenty of that. You make every single line of dialogue count, and don’t pull your punches.

And then, you end it with a joke that undercuts everything that came before, and the drama is all but forgotten by the reader.

Jokes aren’t a bad thing, but I believe in letting drama be drama. Irony needs to be ironic, and ending weighty, dramatic scenes with a joke doesn’t work as a twist. It robs the scene of its tension. It steals away the weight it’s supposed to convey.

Even if you do something that isn’t serious. Even if your writing is campy and ‘cringe,’ as many younger authors would say, let it be what it is and work alongside it, not in spite of it. If I watch a movie where I don’t have to think, I shouldn’t be critiquing it on the allegorical potential it underutilizes or the twists I saw coming.

 

At the same time, I won’t say that seriousness means ‘seriousness.’ You can’t not joke. You just have to time things right. Morality, for example, is something where most writers lose the plot because they want to be different and thus don’t treat a situation how they should.

Morality has to exist in characters. Characters that don’t necessarily think morally, and thus, are more prone to have morality as a consequence they don’t consider. That way, morality and any discussion around it is natural. If you introduce moral dilemmas for the sake of introducing them, you’ve already written yourself into a corner.

Writing too seriously can do that. You aren’t writing to beat some record of whose story was the darkest. That turns your writing into a game, and your story suffers as a result.

 

That’s why I think the best books and the best authors have rather simple stories at the core. You’d be surprised how many follow the basic ‘hero’s journey’ structure. For me, I wrote to be authentically fantastical. I wanted this world to be believable, for what’s happening to be communicated to those reading it so that they let their imagination do the rest.

Because whatever sub-genre mine or your story falls into; supernatural, fantasy, or even some non-fiction memoir about someone’s great-grandfather—it needs to be what it is. It needs to be honest. It doesn’t need to break new ground or say something profound.

Imagine if someone turned your life story into a joke. The tragedy that you would have felt strongest about just won’t hit the same way. It would be—and pardon me for this—tragic.